2 toppled buildings kill 6 people in India
NEW DELHI -- Rescuers found six bodies and were digging through a mound of rubble after the collapse of two multistory buildings east of New Delhi, police said Wednesday.
Another four to five people may be trapped under the debris, police officer Akhilesh Tripathi said.
Rescuers had not pulled any survivors from the rubble 24 hours after the clearing operation started.
A six-story building under construction collapsed onto an adjacent four-story apartment building Tuesday night in the Greater Noida area. The second building, ready for move-in, collapsed under the impact of the first building.
More than 100 rescuers with cranes, sledgehammers and chain saws were working to remove the debris in Shahberi village, nearly 25 miles east of New Delhi.
The owner of the building under construction and his two associates have been arrested and will face charges of culpable homicide, the Press Trust of India news agency said. The cause of the building collapse was not immediately known.
Turkey to look at new anti-terror laws
ANKARA, Turkey -- As Turkey's 2-year state of emergency comes to an end, the government is set to introduce new anti-terrorism laws that it says are needed to deal with continued security threats. The opposition insists that the laws are just as oppressive as the emergency powers they will replace.
Turkey declared a three-month state of emergency days after a failed coup attempt in 2016 and has extended it seven times since then.
As part of a campaign promise before his victory in last month's elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged not to prolong the state of emergency. It was to expire at midnight Wednesday.
Instead, a parliamentary committee is scheduled today to debate government-proposed legislation that, among other things, would allow authorities to press ahead with mass dismissals of civil servants and hold some suspects in custody for up to 12 days. A vote in the general assembly could be held next week.
Under the state of emergency, Turkey has arrested more than 75,000 people for alleged links to Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric whom Ankara blames for the failed coup attempt.
Some 130,000 civil servants have been purged from government jobs for purported links to terror organizations.
Egypt passes bill to rein in social media
CAIRO -- Egypt's parliament has passed a bill targeting popular social media accounts that authorities accuse of publishing "fake news," the latest move in a 5-year drive to suppress dissent and silence independent sources of news.
The legislation was adopted late Monday by the staunchly pro-government chamber, though details of the new bill emerged only Wednesday.
The legislation labels personal social media accounts with more than 5,000 followers as media outlets and empowers authorities to block them on the grounds of publishing "fake news."
There was no elaboration on what is or is not considered "fake news."
The bill still needs to go to President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi for ratification -- a rubber stamp since such bills are often inspired by his government. The general-turned-president, in power since 2014 , has overseen Egypt's largest crackdown on dissent.
Prominent journalists have decried the bill as unconstitutional and a violation of basic media freedoms, saying they grant far-reaching powers to authorities to censor the press, revoke media licenses and restrict journalists' work.
Boat capsizes off Cyprus, kills 19 people
NICOSIA, Cyprus -- Nineteen people drowned when a boat loaded with as many as 150 people who were thought to be migrants capsized off the northern coast of Cyprus, a Turkish Cypriot official said Wednesday.
Tolga Atakan, the transport minister in the breakaway north of ethnically divided Cyprus, said rescue crews were searching for 25 missing passengers in an area where a passing cargo ship reported spotting people in the water.
The Turkish coast guard said it rescued 103 of the capsized vessel's passengers and took them to Turkey. One seriously injured person was being treated at a hospital in the northern part of Cyprus' capital, Nicosia, Atakan said.
Atakan said the nationalities of the passengers have not been confirmed. When asked if they were thought to be migrants, Atakan said "most probably."
Aysegul Baybars, the interior minister in northern Cyprus, told Turkey's CNN-Turk television that authorities were investigating whether bad weather, sabotage or other factors caused the sinking.
She said authorities don't know where the vessel was from or where it was heading.
A Section on 07/19/2018